


tell me all your original sins

by kathillards



Category: GARO: Gold Storm Sho
Genre: Dubious Consent, Knifeplay, Mild Blood, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-15 06:49:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19290448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: Ryuga makes a deal with the devils. At least, that's what he tells himself.





	tell me all your original sins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [capra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/capra/gifts).



> i... don't really know if i did your beautiful prompt justice but i hope you like it! dubious consent garo nonsense is my favorite kind of garo nonsense.  
> title credit to bastille's 'doom day'.

(The song she plays is half-familiar, a childhood hymn caught between his ribcage. Rattling around in his memories, like a siren calling him overboard.

_Peace to the knight who knows death from light…_

Ryuga closes his eyes with a shiver.

_Peace to the priest who knows man from beast…_

Soft fingers trace a spiral down his arm. A Makai rune, ancient and holy and terrifying.

_All those who pray for the knight to come home…_

A half-formed plea catches in his throat, burns a flame there.

Amily re-traces the spiral, this time with the cold edge of a blade.

_…left waiting as he burns his road._

When he opens his eyes, all he sees is white hair and the kind of smile that has never known humor, only the delight of pain.)

 

 

 

He’s never sure how he ends up back here.

Rian’s voice curls around his shoulders, a memory whispering in his ears: _He’s messing with you. Don’t go back. Don’t let them steal you away._

He remembers—the look on her face when he showed up at the doorstep of the store, the tremor in her voice when she had made him promise her, the suspicion in her eyes every time she looked at him that day. The fear, as if he might evaporate before her eyes.

Maybe she had been right to be worried.

His feet move forward anyway. At his hip, he curls one hand around his sword. There’s no cool, steady weight on his finger—Zaruba tucked away safely in a drawer back home—and it throws him off balance somehow.

But then, he should be used to being off balance.

“Would you look at that,” croons Jinga. “The savior has returned.”

Amily is sitting at the piano. In the moonlight, her hair gleams silver and for a second, they look perfectly matched. King and queen of horrors. She plays five notes, a melancholic melody that makes his bones ache, and then rises.

“What a surprise,” says Amily, her voice as dry as if she were remarking on the weather. “Here I thought you had fulfilled your debt to us.”

Ryuga looks between them. Neither Jinga nor Amily seem at all shocked to find him here again. Jinga pours a glass of white wine, backlit by the open window and the star-spotted sky behind him. Everything about this place is chilly and eerie, like a fairytale twisted sideways. A home as a castle as a prison.

He has to wonder who is being locked out.

He has to wonder why he doesn’t feel like the hero here.

“There was,” he says slowly, each word being extracted from his throat, “a Horror attack downtown. Exactly where you said it would be.”

Jinga doesn’t even do him the decency of rolling his eyes.

Amily asks, a touch mockingly, “And did you and your little girlfriend kill it?”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” says Ryuga on autopilot, then winces. Jinga and Amily share a look that seems more amused than anything else, and somehow that’s the most unsettling thing about this whole picture.

“Of course not,” says Jinga soothingly. He moves forward with a deliberate bend to his steps, a predator’s walk. Ryuga flattens the instinct to fall back. “If she was, you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

That has the ring of more truth to it than he would like.

“We killed it,” he says instead, forcing himself to swallow against the dryness of his mouth. “I brought this.”

Ryuga pulls free a vial of deep, dark liquid from his pocket and tosses it at them. Amily catches it, uncorks it, and inhales the scent of the Horror blood bottled inside. Her expression gives nothing away, but the energy in the room electrifies, all of a sudden—the tension of craving, of hunger and thirst, becoming tangible.

Jinga spares a glance back at his wife, who nods at him, and then looks at Ryuga with a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “How noble of you,” he says in a voice that indicates he believes quite the opposite. “To uphold your end of our bargain like this.”

“I keep my word,” snaps Ryuga. “Unlike you.”

Jinga presses a hand to his heart, mock-hurt. “Ouch. And here I thought you were here for… the other part of our accord.”

His gaze turns wicked and promising, raking over Ryuga like he’s up for bidding at an auction. Critical and contemplative, as though he doesn’t already know exactly what he wants to do. Behind him, Amily casually rolls the vial of Horror blood between her fingers and that manages to be more debauched than anything Jinga is doing.

“Do your friends know you’re here?” Amily asks. Her voice is soft enough to be mistaken for sweetness, but he can hear the edge of mocking in her tone. Like a cat peering into a mouse cage.

The words slip out before he can help them: “She doesn’t know.”

None of them know, but Rian is the one he had lied to. He wishes he felt more guilty. Wishes he could remember her voice, or the look in her eyes when she had begged him to swear to her that his deal with them was finished. But she seems so faraway, and only the things in front of him seem real, in this house.

“No?” Jinga arches a silver eyebrow, and then places his wine glass—already empty—on the counter beside them. “Is it because you don’t know how to tell her, or because you don’t want to?”

Ryuga feels his face melt into a glare—this part, at least, is familiar, is normal. “Stop talking about her.”

Jinga’s smile is almost delighted now. “Very well. Amily, if you would?”

 

 

 

(It had been a simple transaction: blood for information, blood for sealing, blood for blood.

Makai priests used blood magic to deal with the darkest of Horrors, the worst of the night. Gald had suggested it—and dismissed it as impossible. There was no way Jinga and Amily would agree. Not unless you had something over them.

It was Ryuga who’d gone out and trapped them in their house, sealed it shut with runes and his own blood, the way Rian had taught him off-hand in those days they’d spent traveling together. Makai magic and Makai blood was the kind of combination not even the most horrendous of Horrors could break.

They’d given her back, whole and unharmed, in her body again. Ryuga remembers staring down at her lifeless body and running down the list of things he would do to save her life. Lady Ryume had said the Senate wouldn’t approve.

Ryuga had said, _I don’t give a shit about the Senate_.

Once, he had overheard Burai speaking to Aguri: _Garo isn’t meant to be like this. I think it’s corrupting him. Or he’s corrupting it._

Aguri had seemed unimpressed. _He’s practically still a child. He understands very little of what it means to be Garo. Not enough to corrupt it._

Ryuga feels only a small flicker of satisfaction that they both had been wrong about the source of corruption.

You can’t make a child kill his mother and then complain that he’s too ruthless.)

 

 

 

Amily is the one who wields the blade. Ryuga doesn’t know if that’s because Jinga doesn’t want to, or simply because he prefers seeing her with it.

Or maybe it’s because she had been the one he had made the deal with: his body and his blood in exchange for Rian’s. An equal trade in almost every way; life for life was always the easiest swap to make.

But Jinga and Amily had never been very interested in _life_.

He should have seen it coming. Maybe he had.

“You’re quite good at this,” Jinga hums. “Standing still.” He strokes his fingers through Ryuga’s hair, smoothing it to the side of his forehead, then trails them down his cheek. His touch is cold and disconcerting, but Ryuga barely notices.

Behind him, Amily curves the dagger in a spiral, a thin slice against the bare skin of his back. He can feel the blood beginning to trickle down but the pain is distant, a light tickling at the back of his mind instead of an overpowering sensation like he had thought it would be, the first time. He wonders again if perhaps she’s placed a spell on him—but her magic is gone, locked away from her.

So maybe it’s just him.

“Only because you make it easy for him, Jinga,” she says with a click of her tongue. “How is he supposed to concentrate on me when you’re standing in front of him?”

Jinga’s smile is annoyingly smug. “What do you think, Ryuga? Would you like me to do something else?”

There’s a whole world of possibilities in the way he says _something else_ , and it takes all of Ryuga’s willpower to stop himself from shivering—he’d done that last time and Amily hadn’t been pleased.

“Do what you want,” Ryuga grits out, but there’s not enough acid in his voice to make it sound defiant. His tongue falters and he worries the look on his face might almost be pleading, as Jinga traces a scar on his jawline with feather-light fingers and a look of delight in his eyes. He can feel his cock hardening, but if he shifts, she’ll be able to tell, so he can’t do anything about it.

“Try this,” says Amily, pressing a thumb against a spot on his spine that nearly makes him crumble, and then offering her hand over his shoulder to Jinga.

Ryuga watches, transfixed, as Jinga bows his head to lick the spot of his blood off Amily’s thumb and finishes it with a kiss to the back of her hand. He can’t see her smile, but he has no doubt that it’s there. Even in death and undeath, they were married.

Jinga’s smile is slow and chilling when he raises his head again. “Do you want to taste it, Ryuga?”

His stomach churns, but the word _no_ doesn’t come to his lips.

Jinga tips his head up with two fingers and presses his mouth to Ryuga’s. It’s not a kiss—it can’t be called that when there’s no warmth, no body heat—but the coldness of it is its own kind of electricity. He can taste his own blood, salty on Jinga’s tongue, but it’s just faraway enough that his body doesn’t recoil.

Ryuga pushes him away, but Jinga’s smile doesn’t falter one bit.

“They say the blood of a Makai knight is good for sex rituals,” Jinga muses. He cocks his head as though he’s deep in thought. “Not that there’s a lot of those. You Makai knights and priests are an abnormally repressed bunch, did you know that?”

“Now, that’s not true,” Amily chides, coming around to face Ryuga from the front. He swallows, thinking of the drying blood rune on his back. This time, he can’t ask Rian what she’s done, or how to clean it off him. “After all,” she says with a wicked smile in his direction, “Ryuga came back.”

Jinga opens his palm and Amily passes the dagger over, Ryuga’s blood still drying on the sharp edge.

“Maybe he enjoys our company,” Jinga drawls.

“I told you,” Ryuga mutters. “I _keep_ my word.”

“And your spells,” Amily agrees, sinking down into the couch with an air of weary grace. “Your blood to seal us. Your body in exchange for that girl’s. Don’t confuse us for that brain-dead Senate of yours. We know very well how the sealing spells work.”

“Your _word_ , Ryuga, was kept.” Jinga flips the dagger over between his hands. “Your promise fulfilled. You are, if nothing else, a knight of honor.”

The way he says those words, they almost don’t ring of disgust. Ryuga bites back his first response, his second, and then gasps out loud when Jinga presses the blade lightly into his chest.

“Sit,” commands Jinga, but he doesn’t exert any pressure on the point he’s holding. Ryuga thinks his legs must react on their own, stepping backwards, collapsing gracelessly, right into Amily’s lap.

“Do we need to tie you up again?” Amily asks. Her hand skitters through his hair, arranging his head on her lap, the movements almost soft. Almost sweet. If it weren’t for the inhuman chill of her touch, and the fact that he can’t feel a pulse, and how she leaves a streak of his blood where her thumb swipes across his forehead.

“No,” whispers Ryuga, and feels more than sees her smile.

Jinga kneels down between his legs, his eyes gleaming with anticipation. He leans over Ryuga and drags the flat edge of the dagger down his chest. Amily’s fingers continue their stroking, gentle in his hair and down his cheeks. Ryuga’s breaths come ragged even though Jinga draws no blood.

“Amily,” says Jinga, lifting his head up to look at his wife. From his angle, Ryuga can see the way his eyelashes flicker white, the smirk glittering in his eyes. “Will you sing for us?”

 

 

 

(By the third time, he knows that it’s the song.

It’s the way she sings, her voice cold and faraway but her words seeping into his skin. It’s how she sings of the knight who fell, of those who loved him, of the night that reigned in his terror. It’s why she sings—not because Jinga asks her to, but because she knows just as well as her husband of the effect she has on him

It’s something about this song—something about her voice—something about her touch and Jinga’s blade and the feeling of being caught between two cold moons.

He wishes he weren’t so easy for them.

He wishes he didn’t remember the song.

It echoes in his mind even when he’s escaped. Lingers when he limps home to shower off the stench of blood and sex. Sticks to him when Rian is talking about something entirely different and his mind shouldn’t be in a place so cold and cruel—but it is.

It’s times like these that he wonders who he’s really trapped there.)

 

 

 

The leather of his pants feels stretched too tight by the time that Jinga pulls them down and wraps a hand around his cock. Ryuga has to suffocate a whine building deep in his throat.

“Here we are again,” Jinga murmurs, his voice soft and dangerous as he squeezes. “I have to wonder, Ryuga, how you let yourself get to this place.”

_Over and over and over again._

“You were—” Ryuga has to stop, his voice breaking when Jinga takes him in his mouth. “You were wrong about me.”

Jinga pulls back with a scrape of his teeth, looking curious despite himself as he looks back up at Ryuga. Amily’s song trails off and her hand drops down to his bare shoulder, nails digging in as if to compound the pain.

“How so?” asks Jinga, pressing a thumb against Ryuga’s cock and almost smiling in satisfaction when Ryuga whimpers.

“You—” Ryuga closes his eyes and feels himself sink even further into Amily’s lap. “You thought I was afraid of my darkness. Of what it meant for me.”

He lifts a hand and presses it to his stomach, where a small trickle of blood from Jinga’s dagger is still going. There’s no pain to it, and he pulls his fingers away covered in red.

“I was afraid of what it would mean to others,” Ryuga says quietly. “Of what I could do.”

Amily hums in understanding and slips one hand behind his head, stroking a spot on the nape of his neck that makes him curl up closer to her, a lurch of longing in his stomach.

“Indeed,” says Jinga, a look in his eyes like he’s slotted another puzzle piece into place. “What kind of a Makai knight are you, Dougai Ryuga?”

This time, when he takes Ryuga’s hard, aching cock in his mouth, it’s without any lingering curiosities. His touch is cold and relentless, and Ryuga can feel his lips curve in a victorious smile when Ryuga cries out.

Amily sings about the knight who burned his road, who turned his light into death, as Ryuga comes in Jinga’s mouth. When he opens his eyes, the blood is gone from his hands, and the pain is so distant it’s turned into pleasure.


End file.
